You Can’t Give it Away: What Marketing Has Done for Business

Here’s today’s conventional wisdom about marketing:  If you have something to sell, every minute of every day, you put your product or service in front of absolutely everyone you can using whatever means you can get your hands on.

In case you haven’t noticed, the clamor for this kind of attention is now at nerve-shattering levels.

Recently, I tried giving something away, and I was once again surprised and disappointed by how suspicious (even angry!) people can get.  Whatever happened to “thank you”?

First, a bit of background.  Besides my bread-and-butter professional work as a business communication consultant, I also have hobby business:  I encourage college liberal arts majors to see how their education can be preparing them for careers in business leadership.  I majored in English myself, then went on to a 25 year career in corporate management.  My English degree prepared me for this in ways people who don’t have a liberal arts degree don’t get.

Among the offerings in my hobby business is a blog called, simply, “For English Majors” where I detail why and how understanding literature (character and motivation), combined with the ability to analyze abstraction, is essential to business leadership.  The blog is free, not only to me but to everyone who reads and comments.  It’s a gift.  No strings attached.  No follow-up emails.  No need to subscribe.  You can visit and leave as you wish, entirely anonymously if you prefer.

I occasionally send postcards, personal emails and personal letters (yes, old fashioned letters with stamps) to invite anyone who’s the slightest bit interested in the future of English majors and the future of business—students, faculty, administrators, and hiring managers—to check it out.  What can they possibly lose?  It’s free.  It’s unusual.  It’s practical.  It’s credible.  It’s needed.  And did I mention it’s free?

Here’s what usually happens after I send postcards, emails and letters.  One in fifty results in a reply, usually from an academic for whom letter-writing is not a lost art.  A few departments link to my blog.  I write to thank them.  A university in Oregon invited me to speak to their Humanities Division.  Of course I did.

But the most telling was a university in New Hampshire whose career center wrote to ask me if it was okay to post a link to my blog on their site (of course!).  And then they wrote this:

“Once you have notified us of your approval. Please do not contact us again.  Remove us immediately from your listserv.  This offer must not lead to anything for which we will be charged in the future.  We will not subscribe to your publication and do not wish to be contacted about your available services.”

Sheesh, I thought.  I’m not selling anything.  It’s a gift.  You’re not on my “listserv” and you never were.  Climb down!   But instead I wrote back that I was pleased they’d be linking to “For English Majors” and I assured them I found the practices they described “deplorable” and wouldn’t subject them to any such thing.

You can’t blame them.  They’re gun-shy, and they’re not alone.  They’re tired of the rapid-fire pop-up ads, the “buy this” emails, the pushy questionnaires (“What’s your ideal job?”) that lead to more ads.  They’ve had it with poorly written “white papers,” once a source of real information, now thinly disguised sales brochures for products that take a little explaining (like IT security or disaster recovery).  They’ve signed up for one too many webinars that promise to teach something but digress quickly to selling something instead.

That’s one example of what marketing has done for us.  But wait.  There’s more.

I met a young man not long ago who told me he’s a firm believer in writing “thank you” notes.  Before I had a chance to agree with him, he shared this secret:  He uses a service that mass produces the notes, using technology that emulates his handwriting to produce notes that look like he wrote them.  He was beaming with pride as he described this.

“That seems to me to be counter to your intentions,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“You’re sending personal messages impersonally.”

“Ah, but that’s the beauty of it,” he explained, beaming some more.  “The recipient of the note doesn’t know it.”

Not yet.  But next time I get a thank you note (and certainly if I ever get one from him), I’ll hold it close under my nose to see if it passes the sniff test.  It won’t be long before everyone does that.

But wait.  There’s more.

An acquaintance I met through a networking event asked me, “Have you heard about this cool book publishing thing?  You pay a fee and write a chapter and your chapter is included in a book of chapters written by famous business writers.  So there you are in a volume with the likes of Ken Blanchard” (the one minute manager guy) “and Jim Collins” (the Good to Great guy).  “Just you and Ken and Jim.  Isn’t that sweet?”

No, it’s not sweet.  You buy your way into print filling the set-aside pages between Ken and Jim (who, no doubt, were handsomely compensated for appearing here with you and other showcasers).  And the integrity in that is…where?

And, of course, there’s still more.

Article-blaster.com fires whatever it is you’ve written to as many online destinations as possible for the primary purpose of driving web traffic to your site.  It doesn’t matter what you’ve written, it matters how thoroughly it’s blasted.  Publishing articles in as many places as possible is one method of maximizing visits to your website.  The byproduct is that it measures articles in bulk only.  Content, quality, relevance, and literacy don’t matter.  What matters is how close you get to the front of the Google hit parade.

So here’s what marketing “best practices” have done for business:  made consumers exceptionally protective and suspicious; enabled insincerity to achieve new heights; diluted “whitepapers” (once a centerpiece of research and credibility) to mere sales brochures; and reduced books and articles to commercial showcase platforms.

This seems to me more like planting the seeds of unshakable distrust rather practices that fuel a robust vibrant economy.

“They Won’t Read It! I’ve Tried!”

Figuring out an alternative to “death-by-PowerPoint” isn’t very hard.  You could turn off the slides and just talk without them.  You could send out a report in advance of the presentation or meeting, rather than cramming the entire report into the slides. You could place that report in a shared file repository, organized by subject, easily accessible.

No, envisioning ways around PowerPoint-heavy presentations isn’t hard.  What’s hard is making those alternatives work.  We’re so used to turning our gaze to the inevitable screen of bullet lists that it’s now impossible to imagine changing the habits of meeting participants who expect to be read to.

“We send out materials ahead of time, but no one reads them. So we’re pretty much forced to drag them through the printed word up on the screen in the meeting.  Otherwise they don’t have the information,” one of my clients told me recently.

It’s a common problem. People who are constantly pressed for time figure the one thing they can move to the bottom of their to-do list is reading.  After all, why spend time reading the material only to then sit through it again in the meeting?   Sadly, though, this approach to knowledge transfer is perpetuating the death-by-PowerPoint problem: participants who haven’t read the information that should actually be in a document—not on a slide—simply expect to gather for the group-read and plod through text-laden slides together.

It would be interesting to calculate the expense of this approach.  Total up the cost of the meeting (how many people, how many hours in the meeting, and how much they make an hour).  Ten people who make $50 an hour in a three-hour session is $1500.  Then there’s the 10 hours the slide preparers spent cramming the document into the PowerPoint slides, another $750.  Did the session deliver $2250 worth of knowledge transfer?  Would it be cheaper if people read and digested information on their own, then met to review it, rather than meeting to learn it in the first place?  An interesting financial perspective.

But, for now, we leave this problem in the category of that’s-just-the-way-it-is.

If you were, however, serious about moving dull, pedestrian text out of your slides and putting this information in status reports, strategy documents, written analyses and wherever else it actually belongs, how could you get people to read them?  Let’s start by giving some thought to why they don’t read them today.

Business writing is boring.  That’s why people don’t read it.  No one ever says, “Gee, I can hardly wait to read that project plan/stack of status reports/competitive analysis/problem report.”  Never.  People don’t like to read business documents simply because they’re dull and lifeless, and who wants to read that?  Sanitized, boiler-plate, predictable language saturates business writing.  It relies on repetitive, tried and true vocabulary, which has often been scrubbed and “approved” by management, quality teams, the legal department or HR.  Operational documents, in particular, are often template-driven, which means they amount to nothing more than forms fill-out.  Business writing, in other words, employs techniques and practices that are the opposite of good writing.

How did this happen?  There’s one obvious angle—that “approvers” are protecting business prose from possible legal exposure.  But in most industries, that doesn’t apply to many documents.

What’s really happened is that well-meaning business “communication experts,” seeking to make information easily accessible and to save readers time, decided that predictability and repeatability are essential to efficiency.  The net effect, however, is just the opposite: no one is reading any of it.  How efficient is that?  These same well-meaning business document designers should take a lesson from writing that’s actually readable and engaging, the kind of writing people choose to read.  Good writing is never predictable and repeatable.

Yeah, you’re thinking, but this isn’t a plot-rich fictional account of the lives of memorable characters.  We’re talking about facts here, just boring old data.  Well, if that’s what you think of strategic planning, problem-solving, competition, innovation, financial risk, on-the-job conflict, and team dysfunction—that it’s all just boring old data—then I guess you can stick with the unreadable, sanitized style business readers are, sadly, used to.  But as Edward Tufte says about boring old data, “If the statistics are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers.”

If, by chance, you’re persuaded that better writing is possible, what can you do about it?  Hire an English major?  Not a bad idea.  (I’m not kidding.)  Or perhaps find the English majors in your midst.  Many companies today have Communication Departments, teams who write the newsletter, create messages about company earnings and events, and generate press releases.  However one thing Communications teams rarely do is write or edit operational documents—project plans, status reports, requirements documents, financial notes, meeting minutes, and all the other things our reluctant readers don’t read.

Perhaps they should.  Instead of sending business professionals to three-day “Business Writing” classes (an impossible timeframe in which to learn to write, as anyone who’s been to these classes will attest), instead enlist writers in the operational work of the company.

Knowledge is the tool we use to create goods and services.  It’s the lifeblood of projects, strategy-setting, problem-solving, and technology creation, and it’s the primary source of revenue in industry today.  We should stop settling for ho-hum, inefficient methods of transferring knowledge, especially when optimizing the delivery of information just takes a little imagination and a willingness to overthrow an established practice most people don’t like anyway.

Graphical Excellence in the Real World

Technical Presentations and PowerPoint

In every organization I’ve been in—both the clients I teach for today and the companies I worked for during my own 25-year career in Information Technology—the complaints about PowerPoint slides in technical presentations are the same:  they’re confusing, too dense, they seem disorganized, they’re hard to follow, they’re obscuring the message, and sometimes they’re even boring.

Some complainers and consultants recommend simplifying the messages—one idea per slide, for example, or cut back on the information, reduce it to whatever will fit on the screen in a big font.  But that does a disservice to the content.  The solution isn’t to render them “lite.”  Instead, the solution is to design them in ways that best serve the information they’re trying to deliver.  They keyword in that sentence is “design”—and I don’t mean colorful background templates.  I mean design that promotes comprehension, design that augments information rather than decorates it.

Galileo, Da Vinci, and Graphical Excellence                

For the last few of years, I’ve been using the ideas and advice of Edward Tufte in my class, “Effective Technical Presentations.”  Some participants in my class are already familiar with Mr. Tufte, as he’s a rather renown subject matter expert in the area of visual display.  The New York Times, for example, referred to him as the “Leonardo da Vinci of data,” and the Washington Post has called him the “Galileo of graphics.”  One might not need more in the way of credentials than that, but we could also add that he’s taught statistics, graphical design and political economy at Yale.

In the last thirty years, Mr. Tufte has gathered and analyzed examples of graphic representations of information from throughout history and from a range of fields of study—architecture, history, scientific discovery, and musical composition.  He’s perhaps best known as someone who is exceptionally critical of PowerPoint, at least as it’s put into practice by most users of it.  He demonstrates in example after example how PowerPoint invites us to degrade and smother rich content by reducing it to nothing more than big letters on a screen decorated by occasional clip art, gratuitous colors and lines, and generally poor design work.

Mr. Tufte’s recommendations are especially relevant for engineering and technical presentations because every technical presenter must convey complex ideas, facts and discoveries clearly and memorably, and just about every technical presentation depends on PowerPoint slides to do so.  (Some presenters, in fact, mistakenly think their slide deck is their presentation.)

In The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Mr. Tufte sets out prescriptive guidelines for preparing visuals in his “Principles of Graphical Excellence.”  Chief among them is that slides must be “well-designed.”  He offers hundreds of examples in his materials (books, website) of great design.

But even after viewing them, most people are still left wondering how to achieve design excellence.  It sounds reasonable but it’s a significant leap to prepare slides that live up to Mr. Tufte’s standards when what most presenters have been doing up until now is simply typing up speaking notes into a stream of slides which are interleaved now and then with an occasional hastily prepared graphic.

Even if someone were lucky or talented enough to hit on the right inspiration for a great design, what are the chances they’d have enough time in a typical workday to create the kind of visuals Mr. Tufte insists are needed?

When Reality Compromises Perfection

You can make considerable improvements in slide prep that will much better serve your high content material, even when you don’t hit the design jackpot.  Here are a few suggestions to improve the PowerPoint portion of your presentation.

First of all, before creating a slide, decide whether what you’re about to create should be a slide at all.  Some things to ask yourself:  Am I creating a slide that’s really nothing more than a cheat-sheet for me so I remember what I’m supposed to say next?  If yes, skip it. That’s not a reason to create a slide.

Another question:  Does the information I’m about to put on a slide do anything other than provide documentation?  In other words, should it be a document instead?  If yes, skip it.  That’s not a reason to create a slide.

Another question:  Does the information I’m putting on this slide amount to nothing more than a bullet list of phrases?  What you want is a cogent argument, not a thin sketch of a few unfinished ideas.  A bullet list of phrases isn’t doing much to promote understanding of complex, rich content material. Skip it.  That doesn’t belong on a slide.

Another question:  Does the slide contain a complete story—cause and effect, accountability for the information, a full set of data? Or is the point of this slide to “spin” the story?  If yes, reconsider.

So now you’ve whittled down the number of slides you were going to create.  Here are some other things you can do to improve the slides you are about to create.

Skip the doo-dads.  In other words, don’t decorate your data with clip art, color, or meaningless shapes.  Don’t put boxes around words or phrases or don’t put (or allow PowerPoint to put) bullets, dashes, or other wingdings in front of words.  They’re just clutter.

Bypass the PowerPoint templates. They’re just decoration.  Keep your audience’s focus on your information, not the shade of green it’s wrapped in.  Your audience has enough to figure out without visual distraction.

Omit anything that doesn’t carry information.  That includes the branding, at least the branding on every page, the repetition of the logo and company name.  I know many Marketing Departments will take me to task for suggesting such heresy, but branding is, first of all, an unnecessary visual distraction and, second of all, it sort of obscures ownership.  Who created this information?  Oh look, it says right here:  “ABC, Inc.”  Not helpful.  How can anyone track the information to its source?

Write a document when a document is called for.  I’m frequently surprised by how much text goes into slides that actually belongs in some written deliverable where it might be read and remembered rather than viewed (usually at an unreadable distance) and forgotten.  So move things out of slide format that don’t belong in slides and put them into documents instead. (Try sending the document out before the meeting and ask people to read it ahead of time.  Include a bribe—cookies for everyone who does the pre-work!  Retention of the material will improve.)

And finally, try to create slides and visual displays of information people can really linger over. They should be lingering because there’s so much to enjoy or discover, not because it’s so confusing they can’t find their way out.  If it takes only a second to get the visual and the audience becomes instantly impatient, then your visual isn’t accomplishing enough.

You may yet hit on a fabulous, inspired design for your visual displays now and then.  But when you don’t, employing these guidelines will help you create leaner, clearer materials.

Persuasive Business Writing

Taking it Personally

 Business writing is often about persuading others – persuading them to buy, to invest, to be patient, or simply to have confidence in a product. 

In technical environments, writing assignments are also about persuasion, and the challenge is compounded by the complexity of the topics and the incredible rate of change that forces issues out into the open sometimes before they’re ready.  The rate of change in technology, a key driver of competition, infuses technical issues with human zeal beyond what one might expect from engineers (a profession not known for emotional high drama).

 Nonetheless, it is true:  High tech runs wild with impassioned believers who champion one technology or another.  The prospect of favoring one software product over another, one infrastructure product over another, means criticizing – directly or indirectly – the competition.  People take that personally.

 So how can you put forward a proposal, a report, an architectural design, or a tech strategy recommendation in writing that transcends the emotionalism and gets the points across?  While there’s no guaranteed formula for success, here are some suggestions that can help.

 Find a Rock to Stand on with Others

 If there’s a technology shift in your future, or the prospect of introducing some technical change, there must be a reason for doing so.  Whatever the objective of the change is should be called out explicitly in whatever is written.  If the goal is to retire old systems or move away from a failing technology to something newer and more reliable, then the objective – a stable, robust environment – is easy to “get behind.”  If the goal is to achieve cost savings by reducing the number of products in use, few people will argue that’s not a responsible thing to do, even if they disagree about the means to get there.

 Finding a shared objective is a good place to start.  Even if the goal is one set by upper management based on “the numbers” (a subject often of limited interest to true techies), the expectation is that all will rally to it.  Making that a premise of what you’ve written is an important point to make early on:  “This is why we’re doing it.”

 Once you’ve established, then put into words, exactly what the aim is of making a change, you can refer to it later, reminding readers how your recommendation meets the goal.

 Recognize Other Approaches

 It’s unlikely that your recommendation is the only approach on the market.  The number of products on the market today that solve just about any conceivable problem was unimaginable even a decade ago.  Even if you believe deeply in what you are recommending, you should acknowledge that there are alternatives, even viable alternatives, that are deserving of respect.

 Of course, if you don’t actually think there are workable alternatives, then don’t say there are.  Insincerity is easy to spot.  But – especially if you think you know that your readership is prepared to resist your suggestions because they already have this all figured out – acknowledge the merits of other approaches.  You’re showing you have a balanced view of the alternatives, and your assessment of the limitations will be more credible.

 Demonstrate Your Homework

 You wouldn’t be writing this recommendation (proposal, strategy, etc.) if you hadn’t done your research.  Accuracy counts, and it is even more important when entering controversial territory.  If there’s uncertainty about a product’s ability to handle volume, respond quickly, perform fail-over operations or handle sub-zero temperatures in field work, make sure you know the facts about these capabilities before you swear your allegiance to it. 

 There is no end of research material to assist technology professionals, not the least of which are the Gartner and Giga research databases, for which many companies have memberships that allow them access to the work of powerful, respected analysts.  If you don’t have the advantage of using this data, there’s always Google.  Besides the internet, there are also reference librarians at universities and industry journals that are available online.  So there’s really no excuse for under-researched reports.

 

Impartial, correct information can intercept an argument.

 

Provide a Balanced View

 No technology product is perfect, and everyone (except, perhaps, sales people) knows that.  Just as acknowledging the strengths of competing ideas makes your criticisms of them credible, so does acknowledging the weaknesses of your idea make your recommendation credible.

 

Acknowledge That You May Be Wrong

 Even if you’re head-over-heels in love with your design, recommendation or discovery, keep in mind that you may be wrong.  Technology is not an exact science.  What you’re sure of today could be called into question tomorrow.  For example, a complementary product, one which your design depends on, may suddenly announce an overhaul that calls into question its overall reliability. 

 

You can’t predict the future, even though you need to in order to be certain in this business.  As long as that is true, admit there’s a margin for error.  Executives, especially, don’t like to hear this.  They live for certainty, at least they need to appear so in order to perform their leadership function.  Still, recognizing that what you’ve written contains a margin for error is the responsible thing to do.  It also adds humility to your profile as a business writer.

 

Respect Your Readership

 While we’re on that point – No one likes to read a business document that reeks of over-confidence.  People who write don’t have all the answers.  They have questions they’re attempting to answer, and they’re serving up the product to an informed group of readers.

 There’s a certain intimacy in writing – business writing included – and readers can tell whether they’re respected.  They expect to be, as you do when you’re a reader.  Make sure they can sense that in all that you’ve written, and your messages will enjoy greater acceptance.

Engage: A Checklist

Before you open Powerpoint and go hunting for a design template, make sure you’ve taken time to “engage” with the presentation you’re about to create and deliver.  Here’s a short checklist of things to do:

Technical Presentations:  ENGAGE Checklist

_________________________________________________________________________

1.         Assess your audience.  Consider:

             Level of familiarity/domain expertise in your topic (How technical can you get?)

            Do they know you, your credentials?

            Pre-conceived notions (What are they thinking?)

            National culture

            Corporate culture

            Industry culture

            Learning Styles

 2.         Set your objective.  Consider:

             What’s your purpose?

            What do you want out of it?

            Better yet, what do they (your audience) want out of it?

            How will you know, when you’re done, that you’ve been successful?

 3.         Know your essence.  Create an elevator speech that answers these:

             What problem are you solving?

            Why is it a good use of your potential audience’s time to come and listen to you?

Beginning with the End in View

Attention and Retention

Next time you attend a presentation or a meeting, take a moment to look back on it a few days afterwards.  What do you remember?  How much of the actual information the presenter presented is still with you?  How many of the PowerPoint slides did you internalize?  Were there snacks at the session?  Did he tell a story or include a moment of humor you can recall?  Can you re-state the net message(s) of the session?

You’ll probably find you remember some things—blueberry muffins, criticism of the vendor’s technical support staff, a cheat sheet you took with you and put somewhere you hope you can find.  But as days pass, you remember fewer and fewer.  If it was a knowledge transfer session and you need to act on what you learned, you’ll probably turn to documentation to supplement your memory of the occasion, and you may be calling the presenter to ask questions along the way.  But if it’s not something that requires you to act at a detailed level based on what you heard (and maybe even if it is!), you’ll find you carry around an impression, a single thought or action item based on what you heard.

As you set expectations about what your own presentation needs to accomplish to be successful, it’s important to keep that in mind.  You, as the presenter, will remember the most about what you said.  For your audience, you and your information will become harder to recall clearly as the days pass.  You know that from your own experience as an audience member.  So, given that, what do you really need your audience to know, remember and act on?

 Objectives: Where Are You Going?

When you approach an assignment to do a presentation, or set out to run a meeting, first consider what you want out of it.  Ask yourself what you want to have happen as a result of your presentation.

This is an important step—before you ever open up PowerPoint or jot down a single idea is this—Think ahead to the outcome.  What will it mean to be successful?  What will your audience think, feel, know, do after you’re done?

 Answer this question:

            How will you know, once you’re done talking, that you’ve been successful?

  You might be thinking, “Because it’s over!”  “Hurray!  I get to sit down!”

 But let’s look for a better answer, something more like “Because the audience gets it!  They learned something!”  Or perhaps “Because they committed to take the action I wanted them to!”

You want them to do something, to be different in some way, because of what you’ve said, done and shown them.  What’s important for you to think about is just how you want them to be transformed by the experience.

You might even want them to be moved by it.

If you’re wondering how a technical presentation can be “moving,” consider that you might be trying to scare up enthusiasm for some product enhancement or a new idea.  You’d want people to get excited.

 A Moving Experience

At the end of the last century, I was the Y2K Project Director for a large retail company.  In 1998, one of my primary jobs was to talk to people in leadership positions about the work we needed to do within our homegrown software to make it ready to handle the properly formatted dates.  I made dozens of presentations, showing off the abundance of two-digit years we’d found throughout our proprietary application code and talking about the potential impact if we were unprepared.  (You’ll recall the common practice among programmers had been for decades to assume the “19” in front of the year and simply reference 89 or 90 instead of 1989 or 1990.  That was about to be a significant problem if we didn’t fix it.)

My presentations, in service to the about-to-be-launched Y2K project, was to get people worried, to move them to action.  I wanted them to see the issue, internalize the problem, take a deep breath and assign the highest priority—and appropriate funding—to fixing it.  These were technical presentations where I hoped for an emotionally charged outcome.  I wanted my audience to be moved to action!                                                                                                                    

(By the way, they were.  The project was launched and the necessary repairs were made and the happy ending was that our systems successfully crossed over into the next century.)

What are other occasions where technical presentations might stir people up or enlist their emotions?  How about persuading others to adopt a controversial design?  How about recommending an unpopular or expensive product as an addition to the company’s standards?  Or what if you want to rush to market with a product enhancement that’s not fully tested because you think it’s good enough and you don’t want to lose out to the competition?  

These are all emotionally-charged circumstances, and the best presentations bring people to action and are essential to decision-making.

 Aligning the Objective                                                                              

 Your objective doesn’t need to be a secret from your audience, and in fact it shouldn’t be.  Tell them what you want out of the occasion.

“We’ll announce the results of our product evaluation, and I’m hoping before we’re through today that you’ll be thoroughly convinced we’ve made the right choice.”

In many cases, it’s also a good idea at the outset to ask your audience about their objectives—what they want out of the session.  This is especially true in meeting settings, also in instructional situations. 

“I’d like to go around the room quickly and ask you to tell me what you want out of today, especially if there are key areas you came to learn more about.”  Then, when no one speaks up (which is likely), pick on someone.

“How about you?  Anything in particular you came to learn?”

That’s often enough to encourage people to speak out if they were reluctant.  But if it’s not, be prepared to prime the pump.

“Does anyone have any concerns about the set of requirements we used to evaluate this product?”

If the answer is yes, add to your objectives for the presentation that you will allay fears about the inadequacy of the requirements used—or whatever other concerns were mentioned. 

You could be more detailed about your objective, especially in a situation where knowledge transfer is the goal and where people in attendance are expected to act on detailed information afterwards.

“I’m here today to talk to you about our new design for the remote handheld devices our field reps will be using.  I plan to cover a little about the hardware basics and then focus mostly on the details of integrating this product with our other key systems.  We’ll discuss the specific message types we’ll use, the attributes of those messages, the various security levels for each message type, and the performance expectations.

“Before we begin, I would like to hear from you if that sounds about right.  Are there other areas we should go over today?”

If a hush falls over the room, it will be tempting to assume that means “no” and move on, as you think to yourself “Whew, no surprises!”  But probe a little deeper.

“Really?  You mean what I planned to talk about is exactly what you came to hear about?  How lucky can I get!  But seriously, if there’s anything more, by all means let me know,” and then someone may indeed speak up.  If not, at least you’ve said you’re open to deviating from the plan, at least somewhat, and you may get the opportunity to add to your objective on the fly.

Asking your audience what they came for will also add to your own sense of well-being about the occasion because you’ll get validation that what you’ve planned to say is hitting the mark.  Frankly, that’s usually what happens (unless you’re woefully unprepared).

Of course, some of them may tell you that what they’re after is something you hadn’t planned to talk about.  If that doesn’t sound like your idea of fun, just keep in mind that your expertise in your material is your best ally.  Remember:  You’re a subject matter expert.  You will be able to add a few points about the additional material. So don’t panic if someone in your audience augments your original plan.  You’ll be able to respond because you know your stuff.

If the additional topic someone has asked about seems far afield from what you were planning to say, you can ask the rest of the room whether that’s a topic they’re interested in, too.  If they say “yes,” and you’re not prepared to do a full explanation of whatever it is, you may need to set up a subsequent session or provide additional reference materials.

These practices strengthen your presentation and help ensure that your audience is getting what they came for which, as we’ll discuss in a minute, is really the whole point.

Know Your Heading, Keep Your Head     

We’ve spent a few pages discussing this phenomenon of beginning with the end in mind.  But it really shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to set your course.  Doing so up front not only makes sure you know when you’ve achieved some measure of success but will also help you organize your content and develop your materials.

Keep your objective in mind as you develop your content and materials, as you practice what you’re going to say, and as you deliver it live and in person.  If you ever get lost in your material, as you’re developing it or even as you’re delivering it, knowing your heading—i.e., what outcome you want from the presentation—will help you recover.

Meanwhile, just keep in mind this is a step you don’t want to skip.  Setting an objective is the only way to know you’ve achieved it.

 

ENGAGE:  Beginning With the End in Mind

            Often, we just dig in and start writing and creating furiously without really stopping to think about the desired outcome.  But there is one, something you as the presenter want out of the presentation.  Before you begin, find it, know where you want to be when you’re done. 

Presentations are a lot of work.  For some, they’re a lot of anxious work.  You wouldn’t want to spend all that energy and creativity and not know, when you’re done, whether you got where you were going, would you?

Presenting Webinars

          Always ready and willing to cut costs, organizations have a healthy and (so far) unsatisfied appetite for effective ways to make presentations to geographically far-flung groups using technology.  Gathering around a conference phone, with the handy “mute” button ready at any moment to conceal a sneering side comment, is a popular method.  It’s cheap, easy to use and readily available.  And it’s somewhat effective, if for no other reason than many of us are used to it, so even if it’s only adequate, at least we’re not uncomfortable in its presence.

 

 

          Then there’s video conferencing, which costs more, requires more set-up, and comes with its own set of pitfalls.  I’ll always remember a meeting I attended that used video conferencing to bring us together with several executives from our parent company in the U.K.  The U.K. execs sat together with their backs to a window, which was covered in only a sheer drape, allowing full light into the room directly behind them.  There the execs sat, shoulder to shoulder, silhouettes against the sheer drape in what appeared to be identical suits, like a row of dark, featureless cut-outs.  It was impossible to tell who was speaking, in part because their accents were somewhat indistinguishable from one another and in part because no one seemed to be moving.  The video part of this conference was a disaster.  Humorous, perhaps, but not effective.  

   

 

 

          Truth is, nothing beats “in person” when it comes to connecting a message to an audience, but it’s often the case that the cost of “in person” is too high.  So we keep looking for other ways.  Lately, webinars have gained in popularity, in part because they’re not very expensive, the software used to conduct a webinar is easy to operate, and there’s a visual component that doesn’t require Hollywood-level film directing credentials to successfully produce.  It’s especially useful for knowledge transfer, as the ever-popular PowerPoint slides are easy to display to everyone in the audience while the instructor is talking.  The audience can ask questions throughout, and the instructor can set up quiz (or polling) questions.  

   

 

 

          That said, webinar-ing has its dangers, as do most things that seem too cheap and easy to be true.  Not the least of which is that some presenters approach webinars too informally, starting late, ending late, imparting with lifeless delivery, talking too fast or bumbling along through mistakes that a rehearsal could have prevented.   

 

          If you’ll be presenting using webinar technology, here are a few recommendations you should not ignore:  

 

1.  Practice, practice, practice.  Even though you can’t see your audience, you still need to be able to respond to them (to questions, interruptions) and to react to whatever may happen.  This is technology, after all, and no matter how proven it is, it can still surprise you.  An un-rehearsed presenter who falls apart while trying to respond to technical difficulties is annoying, and it can be avoided.  It is no less important to practice a webinar (several times) than it is to practice a live presentation. 

 

 

2.  Start on time.  Be plugged in, wired up, and just sitting there waiting at least 10 minutes before the start time.  If you’re hosting a guest or two, make sure he or she arrives 30 minutes early to wherever it is he or she is broadcasting from.  Don’t wait for “more people” to sign on.  Respect those who arrived when you asked them to, and get going.

 

 

3.  End early.  Or at least never end late.  Everyone appreciates getting a couple of minutes back, and they’ll thank you (at least privately, to themselves) if you end early.  This will also force you to practice so you know how long it takes and what you might need to cut in order to end early.

 

 

4.  Two voices are better than one.  A man and a woman are best because it’s easy to tell them apart by the difference in their voices.  Two people can banter.  One person cannot (or better not; the idea of one person bantering is amusing but not especially professional).  Three people can get confusing.  

 

 

5.  Never let on how many people are in attendance at the webinar.  Marketers know this instinctively, but even if you’re not marketing (and I’m assuming you’re not), interest will be higher if your audience thinks they’re part of a big group, not a small one.

 

 

6.  Use polling questions to liven things up.  They’ll also help you get an idea who’s in your audience.  Let’s say you’re doing a teaching a class to a company-internal audience about changes to your project management methodology.  Your polling question might ask “How many of you are project managers using the methodology today?”  Or “How familiar are you with our current methodology?” and then multiple choice answers like “I’ve never used it,” “I read it once,” and “I know it as well as I know my own mother.”  (Humor never hurts.)

 

 

7.  Use your liveliest voice.  It’s easy to go drab when there are no smiling faces shining up at you to perk you up or make you nervous.  You’ll have to be sure you have some spark in your voice (a good thing to practice!).

 

 

8.  Last but not least, never tip off your audience that you’re getting close to the end when you are getting close to the end.  When you say “Thank you for attending” (or some equivalent), make sure you have nothing important to say after that.  Many in your audience will sign off (literally) as soon as they hear anything that sounds like “this is the end.”

 

 

          Webinars are a reasonable and often less expensive alternative to in-person meetings presentation sessions, and they certainly have many advantages over dreadful video conferences.  But there’s quite the onus on the presenter in charge.  If you’re willing to take steps to put on an interesting show, your audience will not only get the benefit of what you have to say but also be grateful for the convenience the technology offers.

The One and Only Way to Become a Better Writer

             When I point out to students in my engineering communication class that learning to be a better writer requires reading, they remind me they do read a lot.  They read documents, specifications, product notes and organizational blurbs, most of them written by engineers or tech writers.  But if you want to learn to write well, you’ll learn more by reading the works of great writers, rather than the works of great engineers.

 

            I point out, too, that becoming a better writer requires practice.  You can’t learn to write if you don’t write.  Then they remind me they do write a lot.

 

            “Do you know how many emails I wrote this week alone?” one student asked me.

 

            “How many did you revise?” I asked.

 

            “Why would I revise them?”

 

            Why indeed.  If you get no feedback (guidance, corrections, recommendations), then I guess you wouldn’t.

 

            Becoming a better business writer (or a better any kind of writer) requires practice and instruction and—although businesses impatient to improve “communication skills” won’t want to hear this—that takes time.

 

            You can’t learn to write better if you don’t revise.  You can’t learn to write better if you don’t read.  And doing either one in a vacuum won’t help you. 

 

            If you really want to become a better writer—if you want to look forward to writing rather than dread it, if you want to create written works people look forward to reading, if you want your written work to get action rather than get filed—take a class.  Not a one-day “seminar” where an instructor lets you have it about remembering your audience, outlining your thoughts and using correct punctuation, all in the space of seven intense hours of rapid-fire instruction.  That may fulfill your professional development plan (“I need 8 hours of writing instruction this fiscal year”) but it’s no way to learn to write. 

         

          Take time to read, write and revise.  Find someone (an instructor, a trusted colleague) who writes well who can point out ways to make improvements.  That’s the only way to become a better writer.

 

Bridging the Geek Gap: Speaking and Writing for Engineers and High Tech

            The other day, I gave a presentation to the National Speakers Association of Oregon about what “geeks” are like.  I was hoping to help them better reach an audience of technical professionals, to be credible and prepared.

 

            What are engineers and high tech professionals like?  Of course we shouldn’t stereotype, but there are some characteristics common to many technical professionals that will help us better manage teams, better present to groups and better write for audiences of “geeks.”  So here goes. 

 

            Technical professionals like certainty.  “It’s all a math problem down there somewhere,” they think, “and so help me if it takes me all week or all year, I’ll figure it out.”  Some are even quite ardent about the truth, openly promoting what they know to be right what they know to be right.

 

            They’re often subject matter experts, and their knowledge of a subject area may run very deep.  After all, what’s the highest echelon thing one can be in high tech?  A “guru”!  Now that’s subject matter expertise!

 

            They don’t care for politics, and by that I don’t mean national politics (but perhaps that, also).  I mean office politics—e.g., figuring out how people are going to react to something, anticipating those reactions, and acting accordingly.  That’s mostly what politics is—gauging how someone is likely to react and adjusting for that reaction.  No, technical professionals, by and large, think the truth speaks for itself.  “Like it or leave it, the truth is what it is, and reactions are irrelevant.”

 

            In his book Leading Geeks, Paul Glen points out that technical professionals see things largely in terms of problems and solutions.  Find the problem, apply the solution and move on.  That approach is the foundation of their success in “geekwork” (a term Glen uses in his book), so they like to apply it to all areas of life. 

 

            They dislike marketing.  One engineer in one of my classes said once, “Engineering is rocket science; marketing is rock and roll.”  I think that about sums it up.

 

            They can be quite patient with complexity, if the topic interests them, and quite impatient with anything that’s too simple. 

 

            If you’re thinking that all makes them a challenging audience, in some ways you’re right.

 

            So take heart.  Here are some geek qualities that will make you happy to have them in your audience.

 

            They’re often lifelong learners.  In part they have to be, since their industry changes rapidly and falling behind isn’t an option.  In part, they’re like that, unashamed to read, think, argue, figure out in many aspects of life.

            They’re creative.  If you see life in terms of problems and solutions, this implies that you figure out both.  Give a geek a problem to unravel, and watch his (or her) eyes light up.  Better yet, present him (or her) with a solution that leads to yet another problem.  The promise of discovery, indeed.

 

            In this era, they’re often multi-cultural.  Manufacturing and high tech:  two areas where globalization took hold early and holds on tight.  Many languages, many cultures.  It’s rich in expectation, sometimes misunderstanding, and certainly growth for anyone who is writing for them or presenting live to them.

 

            A few cautions:  If you don’t want to turn off an engineering/high tech audience, be sure you aren’t:

 

            1.         Too chipper.  Energy is good, but too much cheer is frowned on.

2.         Too general.  If you’re telling this audience something, get to it, and make it practical, something they can make use of now or tomorrow.

3.         Too “promo.”  We’re all on the listen these days for marketing.  Any speech or document that suddenly starts to look or sound like “buy this” is suspect.

4.         Too soft.  By all means, if you want to damage your standing with a geek audience, tell them you’ve come to talk about “soft skills.”  They’ll write you off then and there.

 

I’ve observed, too, that it takes awhile for an audience of engineers to warm up.  I assume this is because they’re used to listening to presentations that are flat, lifeless, dull, so they’re prepared for anyone’s presentation to be about the same.  Give it time.  If you’re credible, well-researched, helpful and energetic, they’ll cheer up!

Inspiration from Grasshoppers

           

Did you know that male grasshoppers are capable of saying six different things?  According to linguist Jean Aitchison, male grasshoppers can say:

 

            I’m happy

            I want to mate

            This is my territory

            This is my woman

            Let’s mate

            Gee, mating was nice

 

            Who knew there was such variety in what grasshoppers have to say?  But, while that may seem like a surprising repertoire, those are also the only things they ever say.  “I’m happy, let’s mate, this is mine…” etc.  That’s it.  The same six declarations over and over again.

 

            We, on the other hand, have no such restrictions.  We can say whatever we want.  Linguists call that “creativity” in language, our ability to say all kinds of things, things that have never been said before.  It sets us apart from animals.

 

            But then we come to business writing (or business presentations) where, for some reason, we’re quite content with repetition and predictability.  In documents, we reach for boilerplate language, which has been scrubbed and approved by committee, to describe projects or operations that are, in fact, much more interesting than the canned language would lead anyone to believe. 

 

            You can be creative with language.  You can move beyond six phrases, or even 600 phrases, or 6,000 phrases, and you can say something that has never been said before.  Not only that, but you can be understood when you say something brand new.  It’s a remarkable thing about language among humans, that it works this way.

 

            Don’t settle for the same-old-same-old when it comes to business writing or presentations.  Be fresh.  Find a new word for a familiar idea.  Turn it up.  Be funny.  Put canned language back in the can, and try saying it yourself, without falling back on tired words and phrases. 

 

You have the advantage here.  You’re not a grasshopper.